Michigan's Race To The Bottom

The president went to Michigan today and got all plain-spoken regarding the recent passage through the legislature of a right-to-work law, and he strongly suggested that it is not to Michigan's advantage voluntarily to become Mississippi.

"What we shouldn't be doing is trying to take away your rights to bargain for better wages. These so-called right to work laws — they don't have anything to do with economics. They have everything to do with politics. What they're really talking about is, giving you the right to work for less money. You only have to look to Michigan, where workers were instrumental in reviving the auto industry, to see how unions have helped build not just a stronger middle class but a stronger America...We don't want a race to the bottom. We want a race to the top. America's not going to compete based on low skills, low wage, no workers rights. That's not our competitive advantage. There's always going to be some other country that can treat its workers even worse."

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That is certainly more like it, and it's what you expect to hear from a president who was just re-elected with the base of support that re-elected this one. What's maddening, of course, is that talking like that is really all a president of the United States can do about a situation like the one occurring in Michigan, where the people elected this governor, and the people elected this legislature, and the people just last month turned back an attempt to write collective bargaining into the state's constitution. If any state's getting the government they voted for at the moment, Michigan is.

(And, yes, I realize that Rick Snyder ran a bait-and-switch to get elected. The man is a Republican. That should have been enough of a warning. And the man took over entire towns, throwing out elected governments and installing his cronies, and his authoritarian chutzpah surprises you now?)

One of the biggest problems progressives have is that we are now going on our third generation in which organized labor has seen its power dwindle everywhere save Major League Baseball. Thousands of people have grown up in an economy in which unions were not a factor. (And thousands of economic "journalists" have grown up in that same economy, in which newspaper unions were among the first to fall, and which is why the casino gets covered wall-to-wall, and its victims are invisible.) The breaking of the PATCO union is now seen as a watershed in the history of presidential power, and not for the rippling disaster it was for most working people in this country. We have had almost 30 years of Democratic politicians holding unions at arms-length. Between lax environmental regulations, non-existent workplace rules, and sweetheart local corporate tax breaks, the "race to the bottom" that the president derided has been going on for decades, with no end in sight. This country is a company town now. Or, as Sub-Left'nt Blimp of the National Review Online put it today:

"...actually Mr. President I do have the "right to work for less money." Why should I be denied that?"

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